Guest, Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.11: Writing Secondary Characters, with Charlaine Harris

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris joined us in front of a live audience at the GenCon Writers Symposium to talk with us about secondary characters—why they’re so important, why they can be difficult to write well, and how she brings her secondary characters to life without giving them a POV.

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Take something you’ve already written. Make your protagonist a secondary character, and make a secondary character your protagonist. Tell a new story with them in those roles.

Grave Sight, by Charlaine Harris, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan

Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.10: Handling a Large Cast

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Amal, and Maurice

What are our favorite techniques for managing large casts of characters, and how do our processes differ from when we’re writing small casts? What does “large” and “small” mean for us?

Liner Notes: No, Howard was not in the room. Yes, despite his absence, he was wearing both trousers and pants while he ventured into the wilds to obtain Maurice’s character sheet.

Credits: This episode was recorded by  Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson, both of whom have more points in “perception” than most people have points.

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Talking Heads! Write a scene between a married couple who has met at a coffee shop unexpectedly—neither of them are supposed to be there. Don’t use dialog tags.

Steal the Stars, by Mac Rogers, narrated as an audioplay with a full cast

Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.9: Quick Characterization

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard

How do you go about defining a character for your readers when you don’t have many words to devote to the project? What are the tricks for quickly establishing someone’s individuality within your story?

Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

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Consider the silhouette test, and then create a list of words that will let you apply it to your characters.

Brimstone, by Cherie Priest

Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.8: Making Characters Distinctive

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Valynne, Dan, and Howard

What do we do to make our characters distinctive? Often we categorize the distinctions as flaws or quirks, and in this discussion we use those as our starting points.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

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Who are the five people you know best? Make a list of their distinctions, as if they were characters in a story you’re writing.

Ink and Ashes, by Valynne E. Maetani

Guest, Live Audience, Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.7: What Writers Get Wrong, with Lou Perry

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard

Lou Perry joined us in front of a live audience at GenCon Indy to talk about law and courtrooms, and what writers get wrong when setting their stories amid legal procedures.

 

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Select a Supreme Court opinion. Read it, and then read the dissent.

Ghouljaw and Other Stories, by Clint Smith

Season 13, Theory and Technique

13.6: External Conflicts for Characters

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Amal, and Maurice

An external conflict is a story driver that originates outside the protagonist. In this episode a large part of what we’ll focus on is person-vs-environment as opposed to person-vs-person. PvE rather than PvP, if you will.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson, both of whom understand that environmental noise is a key external conflict driving their narratives.

 

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“Break Things” – start the character’s story, and then have things begin going wrong. Don’t fix any of it. Just keep making things worse. 

“El is a Spaceship Melody,” by Maurice Broaddus